Fermilab Time and Labor URLs to change this week

Kronos, the vendor for the Fermilab Time and Labor system, will upgrade its service beginning Tuesday, April 15, at 3 p.m. and concluding Wednesday, April 16, at 10 a.m. FTL will be unavailable during this time.

Once the upgrade is complete on April 16, you will need to use new URLs to log in to FTL.
In addition, for the alternate (HTML-only) FTL interface, there will now be two separate URLS — one for the general employee and one for performing managerial functions such as delegating responsibility for timecard approval.

Links to all of the FTL log-in methods and frequently asked questions are available on the FTL home page. We recommend that you update your bookmarks in your browser as follows (note that the links will not work until April 16 at 10 a.m.):

CERN's LHCb experiment sees exotic particle

Last week, the Large Hadron Collider experiment LHCb published a result confirming the existence of a rare and exotic particle. This particle breaks the traditional quark model and is a "smoking gun" for a new class of hadrons.

The Belle experiment at the KEK laboratory in Japan had previously announced the observation of such a particle, but it came into question when data from sister experiment BaBar at SLAC laboratory in California did not back up the result.

Now scientists at both the Belle and BaBar experiments consider the discovery confirmed by LHCb.

In the traditional quark model, hadrons consist of bundles of two or three quarks—creating particles such as pions and protons. But this new exotic particle contains four.

"Four-quark states are examples of 'exotic' bound states of quarks," says Syracuse University professor Tomasz Skwarnicki, one of the lead authors on the LHCb paper announcing the result. "I think that our paper will convince remaining skeptics that four-quark hadrons exist."

The previous skepticism about the four-quark hadron is more than a decade old; Belle and BaBar have studied the particle decays that produce it since the early 2000s.

The two experiments used different techniques in their analyses, says Seoul National University professor and Belle experimentalist Stephen Olsen. But it was difficult for them to come to a consensus, especially considering the comparatively small amount of data they had to use.

LHCb has provided a clearer picture. "When we got our data, we had 10 times more events than both BaBar and Belle, entirely thanks to the LHC," Skwarnicki says. "We have much better sensitivity."

LHCb was able to find evidence of this new particle using both Belle and BaBar's techniques.

I think that the significance of the LHCb result is convincing," says Fabio Anulli, the BaBar physics coordinator and a researcher at INFN laboratory in Italy. "This result adds a new important piece of information for understanding the nature of the so-called 'exotic' states."

The mystery of dark matter: WIMPs may have the answer

From Time, April 8, 2014

It's a mystery that has haunted astronomers for nearly 80 years now: what is the mysterious dark matter that outweighs ordinary matter — all of the atoms that make up stars, galaxies and clouds in the cosmos — by a factor of four to one? We know with near-certainty that it's out there because of its powerful gravity. Galaxies spin so fast that they'd fly apart without the massive cocoon of dark matter that surrounds them, pervades them and holds them together.

It's not that theorists are at a loss for what the dark matter might be: the smart money says it's a still-undiscovered type of elementary particle, produced in gigantic quantities in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. So far, however, despite decades of trying, nobody has managed to find anything more than a circumstantial case to back up this notion.

Connecting with our neighbors

Fermilab DirectorNigel Lockyer

As of this weekend, Fermilab's celebration of the life and work of famed particle physicist Richard Feynman is in full swing.

On Saturday night, hundreds of people from local communities joined us at the laboratory to kick off this celebration with a concert by Huun Huur Tu: Throat Singers of Tuva, a talk by Feynman's friend Ralph Leighton, and the opening of an exhibit of Feynman diagram art by Yale professor, statistician and artist Edward Tufte. By all accounts the event was a success.

Our lab cannot advance its scientific mission without the support and partnership of our neighbors. Fermilab enjoys a good relationship with its neighboring communities, one that we work hard to maintain and strengthen. That is one reason that we hold events like Saturday's concert and public lecture, offer public tours and make a large portion of our site available to our neighbors for recreation and education. We believe that the more often we bring members of the public to Fermilab, the stronger these ties will be.

We'll continue to nurture these ties with upcoming events such as the STEM Career Expo on April 23 and the Family Outdoor Fair in June. And of course we actively go out into the community, giving talks and lectures for local organizations and presenting in classrooms around the region.

Another critical component of the partnership with our neighbors is the Fermilab Community Advisory Board. The board, which meets every other month, advises the lab on public issues and provides ongoing guidance on current and future activities, communication and engagement in our local region. We welcome suggestions for topics to discuss with the board. Please contact Andre Salles in the Office of Communication if you have a project or program that you would like to present to members at an upcoming meeting.

Fermilab is proud of its relationship with the local communities, but we're always looking for new ways to engage with our neighbors. If you have any suggestions about how we can do better, please drop us an email.

Photo of the Day

Lunar eclipse

This picture of last night's lunar eclipse is composed of many exposures of differing lengths, taken between 2:45 and 4:45 a.m. The bright star near the moon is Spica. The planet Mars is the brightest dot across the top right corner. Because the exposures are of different lengths, some stars are visible throughout, and some are not. As the moon starts to brighten, nearby stars appear to diminish in its light. Photo: Marty Murphy, AD

Newport News, VA — Late on April 1, the crown jewel of the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility ("Jefferson Lab") sparkled its way into a new era. Following an upgrade of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, the CEBAF accelerator delivered the highest-energy electron beams it has ever produced into a target in an experimental hall, recording the first data of the 12 GeV era. The machine sent electrons around the racetrack three times (known as "3-pass" beam), resulting in 6.11-GeV electrons at 2 nanoamps average current for more than an hour.